Royal Calkins: Pine Cone bullies Pacific Grove schoolteacher

Those who spend much time at all perusing the opinion pages of Peninsula newspapers may have figured out by now that Pine Cone Publisher Paul Miller and I aren't pals.

We don't get together and gossip about newsmakers. We don't run in the same circles and we don't have much in common when it comes to understanding the difference between fair comment and bullying.

It's a strong word, bullying, but it is the best way to describe what Miller was doing in his weekly editorial on Friday.

He wrote about Patricia Long, a Pacific Grove High School teacher, who was featured in an earlier Pine Cone article about the highest salaries at the school.

In response, Long wrote an entirely reasonable letter to the editor (Miller in his other hat), in which she accused his newspaper of having a vendetta against public employees and performing inadequate research before producing the previous article. She obviously was upset about the piece, calling it "mean-spirited."

Long made a suggestion: "Maybe next week you could publish lists of salaries and assets of all Pine Cone employees, including the editor, along with number of hours worked."

My, did that ever push Miller's buttons.

Here's what he wrote about her.

"...(W)e certainly hope she isn't the most competent (teacher at PG High), because the letter evinces a shocking lack of understanding of journalism, politics, economics, history and the law. If you read the letter, you'll surely be troubled to think that the person who wrote it is an educator, and role model, for our young people."

The editorial was reminiscent of a severely misleading and fact-challenged attack Miller made against a local water activist. This one went on to compare Long to a "petulant preschooler" and to call her "dumb" for suggesting ill motives on the Pine Cone's part.

After lecturing her about the law that makes government salaries public information, something she surely understood before daring to stand up to Miller, he really let her have it.

I'll repeat her suggestion about publishing Pine Cone salaries: "Maybe next week you could publish lists of salaries and assets of all Pine Cone employees, including the editor, along with number of hours worked."

Here's how Miller characterized it.

"Which brings us to Ms. Long's utterly irrelevant, playground-style demand that The Pine Cone reveal the pay of everybody who works here and all their assets, 'including the editor.' We aren't paid by taxpayers, ma'am, so it's none of your business."

It is a puzzle why an editor would so clearly twist the words of a letter published right there on the same page.

On behalf of responsible journalists everywhere, I would like to extend apologies to Patrica Long for what Miller did to her. Anyone singled out for negative attention in a newspaper absolutely deserves the right to a response and absolutely does not deserve to have that response mangled and turned back against them.

I have been accused of being too tough in editorials and columns at times, and that may be true. But I know the difference between criticizing public figures, which Long is not, and criticizing someone whose only crime is to have worked long enough and hard enough to climb to the top of the pay scale. I want to assure those who respond to Herald opinions or our news articles that they will never be treated as shabbily as the Pine Cone treated her.